I DON'T WANT A DICTATOR AND I DON'T WANT A KING

Say it loud and say it proud

I don’t know what Donald Trump is going to do now, but like everyone else I know what he is capable of doing. And willing to do. That of itself should seriously inform how we live our lives.

This awful chapter will be over someday. The challenge is to be fully cognizant of the danger this administration represents right now - to our Constitutional principles, our freedom, and in some cases even our lives. I don’t know how much Trump is really aware of the details of the larger project he spearheads, as there are times when it seems he’s hardly even in the loop. This presidency is The Apprentice on steroids, Trump a fake boss who is little but bluster yet unfortunately has the nuclear code. And he is not alone. The people who have enabled this authoritarian coup and are enabling it now, those who in their hearts know better and those who in their hearts do not, are every bit as responsible for this horror as he is.

But enough about them. I want to talk about us.

The American people are no longer asleep to the danger in our midst.

Americans have been known throughout the world as being slow to wake up sometimes, so distracted we can be by the bright and shiny lesser things in life. But once we do awaken, we slam it hard. And people are starting to do that. The problem is that we were a bit slow on the uptake, still in shock and processing what was happening while the Trump forces were already Shock and Awing through their first hundred days.

As a result, Trump’s path to dictatorship has been astonishingly smooth. A disbelieving and somewhat naive electorate kept routinely catching up to what he was doing just a half a beat too late. We were still waiting to see something verified by the New York Times before we gave ourselves permission to be upset by it. Yet in today’s world, by the time something hits the legacy media it’s often chewed over leftovers already. Online, things are happening in realtime and we’re monitoring events for ourselves. We need to completely accept that this is what it is - dictatorship in the making - and be one step ahead of him instead of always one step behind.

For instance, no Bernie, he’s not “leading us toward” authoritarianism. We’re basically there. The evil they’ve already perpetrated increases like a higher drip of intravenous poison almost daily, and it’s foolish at this point for any of us to think they might not be doing what they’re doing. They’re doing it. Anyone who thinks this isn’t like Hitler needs to read up on Hitler.

Yet Trumpworld is meeting with a form of resistance they might not have expected. They moved quickly to take over institutional powers and succeeded. But they did not necessarily expect - and aren’t totally sure how to handle - the massive wave of political guerilla warfare now happening. People are jamming the evil works of fascism in ways both large and small. We’re not waiting for direction from a centralized command because there isn’t one. Trump/Vance/Miller etc. can’t target the leader because it’s a leaderless phenomenon. People are listening to their own gut - creating content, peacefully protesting, showing up wherever, and overall creating a forcefield that will hold back the monstrous assault we are experiencing. Each of us is a power center. The heart as well as the head is in charge now. And that’s why we’ll prevail.

We’re way, way far from the end of this thing, however. They’re a wily group, that Trump gang, and they have no intention of losing this war. Note that I said war, not election. Never in my lifetime - in fact, I don’t think it’s ever happened before in American history - has a President seemed so intent on waging war against Americans. Those ICE raids aren’t just being waged against a criminal element, and those National Guardsmen aren’t just there to scare immigrants. The whole thing is an attack on our values, our Constitution, and should we not comply, on us.

Some are still saying, “And no one’s doing anything!” but it isn’t true. California Governor Gavin Newsom is very strong right now in standing up to the President. Senator Chris Murphy, Congresspeople Jasmin Crockett, Greg Casar and Melanie Stansbury are among a large group of impressive voices among Democrats in Congress. On the Republican side, the lone voice of Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska is a cry of conscience. If there’s a lesson here for the future it’s that both parties need to reclaim their soul. There are people from every side of the political spectrum who are speaking up and doing what they can. In every state, there are people and organizations trying to hold the line.

To say the elites got here way too late is an understatement. We had years to prevent this. I know extremely well the institutional resistance to anyone suggesting that the way to beat Trump was to break out of the mold, screw the old rule book, and offer an actual alternative to his craziness when we still had time. But that was then and this is now. The Democratic Party may or may not get it together enough to flip the House in 2026. I pray they do.

Yet a greater challenge still lies before us, no matter whether or not Democrats can win in ‘26 and ‘28. There is now a massive population of Americans who believe a totalitarian government might be the better way to go. They can’t see where democracy did that much for them, really. They’ve been losing ground economically and socially for years, and the painful truth - one which too many Democrats still fail to acknowledge - is that in a lot of respects they’re right. At the very least people deserve the respect of our acknowledging their pain.

The trickle-down economic delusion that destroyed America’s middle class is not just economic data to people who are living it. It’s suffering. It’s broken families. It’s addiction. It’s sickness. It’s crime. It’s chronic anxiety. The elites didn’t see that because it wasn’t in their neighborhood. Having traveled the country as I have, I did. And I saw the arrogance and entitlement of those who felt they could “contain” whatever resistance there might be to empty neoliberal promises. Despite what many of us saw as huge warning signs, they saw no reason to fundamentally change. So while a Republican President started the trickle-down con, no Democratic President stopped it. The American people have every reason in the world to be looking for a better way.

And that’s what we need to start imagining now. What do we want America to look like on the other side of this disastrous era? We need to imagine the America we want, articulate it, and reverse engineer from there. This is a job for each of us to do; no more waiting to see what the guys on top will allow. Those guys should retreat to their havens in the Hamptons and be quiet for a while. If there’s a lesson in any of this - and there are so many - it’s to stop farming out our citizenship to others. The political class who supposedly knew what they were doing, quite simply, did not.

It’s not the elites who are going to save us, especially with many of them now spewing the narrative that it was all Biden’s fault in order to cover up their own complicity. It’s not a political party that’s going to save us. It’s not one charismatic leader who can raise his rod and stretch his hands over the waters until they part. It’s going to be all of us. That means anyone and everyone who sees tyranny in our midst and is ready to put our lives on the line to make sure we save our country.

Make no mistake about it, those Trump guys are tyrants. And they admit that, by the way. They kind of think that’s a good idea! Whether it’s the Curtis Yarvin crowd, Peter Thiel and the Tech Bros, Christian Nationalists, Project 2025-ers, Trump/Vance/Miller or anyone else, they are unabashed in their intention to replace our Constitutional system of rule by law with rule according to whatever they think best.

Whether we’re left, right, centrists, Democrats, Republicans, conservatives, liberals, progressive, blacks, whites, Latinos, Jews, Christians, Hindu, Muslims, or anything else, what matters is that we are here to protect our freedom, our Constitutional system however flawed, and our planet.

If things get too intense, they will block us on the Internet or use whatever other means possible to break our communication with each other. But what we are doing now is laying the groundwork for the power that will be there even if they do. People will just keep moving. We will do what we know in our hearts we should do, a concept most elites have a hard time understanding. In AA it’s said that “every problem comes bearing its own solution.” The mess we’re in is turning us into the people we need to be in order to handle it. The grief, the anger, the frustration, the fierceness, the fear, and the love - all the emotions we’ve been through and are going through right now - are putting us through a wringer, but they are transforming our spirits. The pain of this moment breaks through the chains of shallow thinking that have defined our modern politics. An expanded set of political tools will emerge from our expanded minds.

We’re not going to be the first generation of Americans who wimp out on doing what it takes to protect our country at an hour such as this. Nope. We were sleeping but we’ve awakened. Our fierceness is showing. Our passion is rising.

Just make sure that that includes yours.